Not an April Fool's Joke: Hi!

No, this is not an elaborate April Fool's Day joke concocted by Chris Adamson (invalidname) and me.

No, this is not an elaborate April Fool's Day joke concocted by Chris Adamson (invalidname) and me. Chris really has moved on to other endeavors, and I will be taking over the Java.net editorial duties starting today. So: hello! In this first post, I'll give you a chance to get to know me and my history. Starting tomorrow I'll attempt to resume the Java conversation that Chris so ably maintained and advanced over the past almost four years. I can't promise that I'll resume Chris's music themes, but--who knows? His argument about the benefits of working within constraints[2] is pretty convincing.

I have been a professional programmer, architect, developer team leader, etc., for the past 30 years. So, yes, I've seen a lot. My first program was a tic tac toe game I wrote in high school using the language APL, on a teletype machine that was connected to an IBM 360 at a local university. The program was stored on yellow paper tape, with holes punched into it representing the source code. In college, I wrote space simulations on DEC PDP machines, again using teletype "terminals."

In my first paid programming job, I worked on HP 9845[3] machines, which were revolutionary in that they allowed researchers to do complex programming and view on-screen line plots right in their offices, instead of having to launch jobs on the mainframe and walk all the way to the "computer room" to get their printed results. Programs were stored on 8-inch floppy disks or small cassette tapes. The operating system was typically booted from tape. All this for just $35000 per machine!

I experienced the "birth" of PCs: my first one, a Tandy (Radio Shack), cost a mere $3500 for 256 Kbytes of RAM, and it also came with a big 10 MByte hard drive. In those days (the 1980s) I did a lot of programming in various flavors of BASIC, dBASE/FoxPro, Fortran, and, later, C.

In the early/mid 1990s, I was working on multi-processor Sun machines, developing multi-threaded applications that analyzed satellite data. I had some freedom to experiment with new technologies and tools, and in 1997-98 I began working with Java, writing data visualization programs for the researchers. I remember a young co-worker asking me once: "Do you think Java is just a fad?" I didn't think so, because I had worked with enough different architectures by that time that I readily appreciated the concept of "write once, run anywhere." Even Microsoft came to appreciate that idea, in its attempt to gain acceptance for COM objects that would run on non-Windows architectures. When that didn't happen, they settled for creating the Java-like C#. Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, no?

The JavaOne Student and Educator Program[17] is offering a special deal on JavaOne attendance for educators, and a free pass for full-time students, ages 18 and up: "What You Get :All the benefits of a FULL conference attendee, which includes: JavaOne general and technical sessions, panel discussions, HOLs (Hands-on-labs), BOFs (Birds-of-a-feather), the Pavilion and the After Dark Bash / Networking Mixer! Not to mention a "hang space" (which includes video games, movies & more!), plus you will be able to check email any time at one of our many hacker stations."

And in a new Mobility Tech Tip[18], Vikram Goyal describes techniques for Discovering Devices and Sending Files via Bluetooth in Java ME[19]: "One of the first steps in implementing Bluetooth applications on Java ME devices is the discovery process. In a nutshell, the discovery process is the process by which Bluetooth-enabled devices find each other, and then handshake to find out the services that they can each support. The next step, invariably, is learning how to send data between these paired devices. In this tech tip, I will show you how to create a MIDlet that will search for devices and services, and then will allow the user to send a simple note to one of the found devices."

In today's Weblogs[20], Sergey Melenkov writes about insert and delete issues in Java from JavaFX[21]: "The most powerful advantage of JavaFX is an easy use of Java classes. However, you can encounter an issue when calling some methods, for example, those that have the insert and delete names. The File class contains the delete method. How would you delete a file from JavaFX?"

Terrence Barr wonders about licensing freedom in More freedom, or less? (Or: Qt to be released under LGPL)[22]: "A couple of weeks ago at FOSDEM in the Java Libre Room we had a discussion about whether pure GPL (as in 'strict' - with no exceptions) is still up to date given the evolution of open source and it's increased acceptance and use in the IT industry."

And, Fabrizio Giudici is not fooling around in his post BeansBinding -> BetterBeansBinding[23]: "To be clear, this is not an April's fool. As a follow-up to my previous post, I can tell that I've talked with Peter Zhelezniakov, the person presently in charge of JSR-295, and he's been very kind, on behalf of Sun, to provide me with all the drafts and development documentation left by Shannon Hickey."

The latest java.net Poll[24] asks "Are you more likely to use a library or framework if it comes bundled for your IDE or build tool?"

In today's Forums[25], lwhite provides a solution for a 404 error that occured when Markus deployed Glassfish V2 Cluster example applications in Re: Cluster (in memory replication)-after deployment 404 resource not available[26]: "From your description, my guess is that you might be pointing to the wrong port. When the blog says this: Now you can access your application on both of your cluster instances by directly pointing your browser to each server instances. (eg : and :). This does not mean port 80. That is the port of the DAS. I believe by default that the http ports for the instances are 38080, 38081 for a two instance cluster. Give that a try."

Felipe Gaucho continues the Re: Jersey or Servlet ?[27] conversation: "Usually I adopt resource injection (like datasource and JMS
resources), so it is always setter injection... but it is really not
important.. DI is good to reduce external configuration files.. otherwise it is
also not so relevant.. you will have the same solution quality in both
scenarios (with or without DI), the only difference is the effort to
have your resource reference."
tbefjowens has a question for the community about Multiple instantiation of a Web Service[28]: "I have a web service that GlassFish seems to be instantiating twice. My @PostConstruct method is being called twice. The web service is configured to start on deploy. My question is; what will cause GlassFish to instantiate a web service multiple times?"

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